Lance Austin Olsen and Jamie Drouin have been releasing
interesting artefacts on their Infrequency Editions imprint for a fair while
now. At the time of writing, there are
twenty-eight releases available via the Infrequency Bandcamp account, mainly
the work of Messrs Drouin and Olsen, but also with items by Johnny Chang,
Sabine Vogel, Thomas Anfield, Yann Novak, Jeffrey Allport & Chandan
Narayan. Infrequency concerns itself
with “…new forms of electroacoustic improvisation and documents of conceptual
sound installations”. This Canadian
imprint was established in British Columbia in 2001 “…as a platform for artists to experiment with sound…” and “…focuses on new forms of electroacoustic
improvisation and documents of conceptual sound installations.”
Lance Austin Olsen has represented Canada in a number of
biennials with his large-scale painting and drawings. Also in 2018, Dark Heart was released on Another Timbre featuring three of Olsen’s
scores realised by Apartment House, Terje Paulsen, Ryoko Akama, Katelyn Clark,
Isiah Ceccarelli and Patrick Farmer, plus Olsen himself performs a score by Gil
Sanson.
Jamie Drouin describes himself as an “…electronic sound
composer and visual artist”. His
minimalist works highlight the unique perceptual experiences which can emerge
from reduced palettes, and the confluence of tones over time.” Drouin has collaborated with several
international artists, including projects with Christian Weber, Lucio Capece, Crys
Cole, Olaf Hochherz, Karl Kliem, Hannes Lingens, Yann Novak, Mathieu Ruhlmann,
and Sabine Vogel. Also worth a mention
is the Simon Reynell-organised concert recently immortalised on disc by Mikroton;
The Holy Quintet featuring Drouin
along with Johnny Chang, Dom Lash, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga and David Ryan.
Jamie Drouin
Paysage
CANADA Infrequency
Editions no number CD-R
(2018)
A drone work, of sorts.
Different elements arrive and depart, ebb and flow, come and go in this
single 40 minute piece. With this kind
of “constructed” work, I often find myself trying to imagine how the piece was
built. A clue is given on the inside of
the sleeve; “recorded and composed
between 2005-2009”. So, Drouin made
the recordings before he composed the
piece. .
Drouin himself describes the piece thus; “Paysage is an album of several viewpoints upon an ever shifting
landscape – an ‘exquisite corpse’ of sounds which combine in the listener’s
mind to form a singular experience of a place.”
Aside from the omnipresent sine tones associated with any
synthesiser system, Drouin coaxes some very untypical sounds from his
“traditional Moog-style 5U modular” analogue synthesiser. Gaseous bass-heavy drones, static-y growling,
choral whines, hollow tube-like, voltage hum, heavy electrical devices being
switched on and off, a waterfall… Over
my shoulder, in the kitchen, the refrigerator is failing; loudly grumbling away
to itself for the last four days as I wait for the repair man. In combination with playback of Paysage, this is the first time I’ve
been able to bear it.
At 10 minutes, the piece becomes a kind of slowed down
Morse code message, although the transmission of a message like “JOQ90”
repeated is unlikely to be deliberate on Drouin’s part, and reflects only my
own obsession with looking for hidden meaning in the unlikeliest of places
At several points, the bass information induces rattling
activities of objects in the room, which puts me in mind of David Velez’
excellent Unaware from 2015, whose
stated purpose was to set up an orchestra of noises derived from the contents
of the listener’s space through sound waves when played over domestic hi-fi
speakers. At 27 minutes a series of short hits of bassy static,
becoming overlaid. A propulsive drone
paired with drip-like sounds emerges only to be subsumed by a spiky return of
the object-rattling bass artefacts, reducing the heat toward the very end. A grey cloud passes overhead without
precipitation. This is an environment
you inhabit.
Lance Austin Olsen
Plato’s Cave
CANADA Infrequency
Editions no number CD-R
(2018)
Lance Austin Olsen is a painter who also operates in
sound. On this single piece of music, he
presents an intriguing artefact - you could almost describe it as a picture
rendered into sound. The piece consists
of a series of interesting bumps and crashes as if the artist recorded himself
dropping things while moving around his studio one morning. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, being a painter, Olsen carefully presents the sounds of things
you would expect to find in an artist’s studio; paintbrushes stored in tin
cans, the ironwork innards of an old upright piano. A flash of tremelo’d guitar one minute; a
minute later Olsen plucks a curtailed staccato out of one of the bassier piano strings.
Olsen supplies the following to put the work in context:
“The philosopher
Plato posited that, a person chained inside a cave, and unable to see the
outside, would formulate their ideas of the physical world based on the shadows
projected onto the cave walls. To a
large extent, our individual views on almost everything are based upon shadows
and fragments, and each of us constructs a world to our own liking based on the
same fragments, yet experienced in endlessly new combinations. Each moment, or grouping of sounds in a
performance, creates a visual map in our mind that would bear no resemblance to
the map produced in another listener’s mind. The performance is being
experienced in the form of audio shadows, filtered through that individual’s
particular life and viewpoint.”
Glassy synthetic washes are gradually introduced. Seasons change, spiders build their cobwebs
in the corners of the studio, life goes on.
Olsen paints. The piece is
dynamic and robust. At 26 minutes I was left wanting more, but Olsen
is prolific and there is plenty more work to explore.
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